Whole earth - or totally barmy?

Biodynamic food is even more expensive than organic produce and is gaining its fans. But can any farming system that follows moon cycles and involves burying cow horns stuffed with manure be taken seriously?

Eighty years have passed since Rudolph Steiner, the Austrian philosopher, gave the eight lectures that would form the basis of biodynamic farming. The agricultural movement has now spread around the world. In Germany there are 1,331 biodynamic farms, in Canada about 30, in New Zealand 42, in Switzerland 215, in Italy 250, and in the UK 122.

Biodynamic food is beginning to penetrate the mainstream marketplace, albeit slowly, and gaining a reputation as it does so for exceptional quality. Heritage Prime pork (Nigella Lawson's favourite sausages and featured in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's books), Hampstead Tea and Coffee, Tablehurst apples, Old Plaw Hatch cheese and yogurt, and a long list of biodynamic wines all win awards and attract notice for the intensity and vibrancy of their flavour.

Unsurprisingly, biodynamic produce also commands a high price premium, even more so than organic food: Heritage Prime pork, only available by a whole or half carcass, costs £10.90 a kilo, as opposed to £6.20 per kilo for a whole pig from Sheepdrove Organic Farm. But that is supposed to reflect the sheer labour-intensive nature of a biodynamic farm: a conventional farm of a few hundred acres might have two workers, while Old Plaw Hatch, a biodynamic farm in West Sussex of similar size, has 15.

Denise Bell of Heritage Prime, which is based at Shedbush Farm in Dorset, says that some farmers go organic because they think they will get lots of subsidies. "But biodynamics isn't like that, you have to believe in the whole thing you're doing, and it takes forever to get a return. But if you persevere, and you do it right, and you keep the purity, you do get that return."

Aylie Cooke, one of the head buyers for Fresh and Wild, the chain of wholefood and organic food shops, says that there are significantly more biodynamic products available now than there were five years ago, and she has noticed customers showing more awareness and interest. Fresh and Wild is planning to launch biodynamic training days to make sure its staff can really explain what biodynamic means; a reflection, perhaps, that most consumers have difficulty in grasping the odd (many say fanciful) ideas behind this movement.

In brief: a biodynamic farm must be seen as a whole living organism within the context of both the planet and the cosmos, with no chemicals used on the animals or soil, just homeopathic medicine, the preparations (seven recipes handed out by Steiner) or the compost of the plants and animals on the farm. A biodynamic farm, therefore, must be as self-sustaining as possible. A mixture of animals and crops is preferred, and planting and harvesting are to take into consideration the moon's orbit and the constellations of the stars. The soil, the earthworms, the microbial activity beneath the surface - these are the most vital aspects of the farm, because from healthy soil comes healthy food, and from healthy food comes healthy minds.

Steiner also founded the anthroposophical movement and the Steiner schools, and devoted his life to a unique and sometimes bizarre combination of spiritualism and science. He was convinced that poor farming practices were leading to falling nutrient levels and life forces in plants and animals, and that that was leading to our declining spirituality: "Nutrition as it is today does not supply the strength necessary for manifesting the spirit in physical life," he told his followers.

Quackery or scientifically grounded? There are three particular aspects of the biodynamic technique that lead most scientists and farmers to continue to reject it. The most attractively bonkers aspect of biodynamic farming is planting by the moon and stars. In a world where horoscope-based advice is doled out on Radio 2 every week, there are probably plenty of people who find this idea perfectly acceptable. In fact, the famous Tresillian House gardens in Cornwall are tended under a similar regime, the charmingly named moon-gardening. Both moon-gardeners and biodynamic farmers claim the practise is based on thousands of years of observation by cultures as diverse as the Sumerians, Mayans, Chinese, Romans and Ancient Greeks. But for most scientists, it is, as one agricultural scientist who wished not to be named put it, "absolute rubbish".

Dr Carlo Leifert, who is heading the European Union's largest ever investigation into organic farming and who grew up amid biodynamic farmers, says that "in the wider academic community the approach of planting by the moon cycle is seen as wacky, so nobody can really find money from the main funding bodies to look into it. My own feeling is that the impact that the moon possibly has is probably minute compared to other impacts, but then again, who knows?"

The second problematic area is Steiner's preparations, of which the most notorious is the one known as "Preparation 500": manure stuffed into a cow horn, then buried underground throughout winter before being mixed in homeopathic quantities into gallons of water stirred first clockwise and then anticlockwise for exactly one hour before being sprayed over the earth. The other preparations involve ground silica for foliage, and the administration of herbal preparations which include yarrow, camomile and dandelion to the all-important compost heap.

In 1993, research carried out in New Zealand by Professor John Reganold of Washington State University and published in Science concluded that biodynamic compost was indeed of better quality than compost from conventional farms. In 2002, a Swiss paper on organic farming from FiBL ("probably the most highly regarded purely organic farming-focussed research institution in Europe," says Leifert) published by Science magazine concluded that biodynamically tended soil showed higher biodiversity and higher levels of microbial activity than either conventionally or organically farmed soil. Lots of microbes are, in case you're wondering, a good thing: the busier the soil the better. But why biodynamic soil should be in such wonderful condition is not yet understood, and FiBL has now launched another study to find out, while in the US, the Michael Fields Centre has had US Department of Agriculture backing for some of its research into biodynamic growth-regulators.

But the third area of controversy has to be the results of all this: does biodynamic farming actually lead to healthier food? The various answers all express, in their different ways, both the problems and the attractions of the biodynamic methods. "In order to understand biodynamic farming, there has to be a paradigm shift," explains Ton Baars, newly appointed professor of Biodynamics at Kassel University in Germany. "I try to explain to my students that there are forces such as gravity and magnetism which are accepted by conventional science, and these forces we refer to as hard forces. But biodynamics deals with soft forces, life forces, and the problem is to get conventional science to accept these soft forces as well. Biodynamics is a holistic view of the world, and our science also takes this approach."

One of the most controversial biodynamic approaches to which Baars refers is a test usually known as crystallisation, which involves mixing plant juice or blood with calcium chloride and then crystallising it on paper. David Younie, an organic farming specialist at the Scottish Agricultural College, says: "It's clear from thousands and thousands of trials that there really is a difference between the crystallisations formed by, for example, a conventionally grown carrot and a biodynamic carrot. The biodynamic community claims that biodynamic carrot crystals are much more complex structures than the mainstream organic or conventional because their carrots have got more vital force, more life forces. But the problem with this technique is that it doesn't actually tell you anything other than that there is a difference. No one has found a way of interpreting these crystals in a truly objective, scientific way."

So although crystallisation proves conclusively to biodynamic believers, with their holistic approach to science, that biodynamic carrots are better, for the rest of us these tests can seem meaningless. "Until someone calibrates these tests with standard biochemical tests," says Leifert, "you either believe it or you don't." Conventional biochemical tests for vitamin/mineral/amino acid differences are, overall, still inconclusive.

There is, however, one aspect of biodynamic farming which some scientists cite as a possible explanation for the quality of biodynamic food. It is nothing to do with cosmic radiation or cow horns: it is simply the passion the biodynamic farmer feels for his farm. Biodynamic farms are exceptionally pleasant places to be, with trees and flowers, and dogs and piglets wandering about, and an absolutely different smell to a conventional farm - biodynamic manure has a mild and sweet aroma that is extremely pleasant, unlike the sour-smelling stuff that comes out of intensively farmed herds. "When I visit conventional farms, the farmers never talk to me about the quality of their soil. And I'm a soil scientist," says John Reganold. "But when I go to biodynamic farms, the farmers just go on and on about the soil, they can't talk about it enough." As one farmer says, there is an old farming expression. "The best fertiliser is the farmer's footprint."